Old Ingram

J. C. W. Ingram's Church of Christ grew fastest in towns like his. With no organization above the congregation, the churches spread through frontier preachers and camp meetings. In 1906, when the census formally separated them from the Disciples, Texas Churches of Christ had 627 congregations and 34,006 members, growing fastest in small towns and rural areas under itinerant preachers. By midcentury Texas held 35 percent of the 450,000 members nationwide; the state's congregations numbered 2,215 in the 1990s, with 292,585 members, though rural churches declined as the countryside emptied.

What the plaque says

Old Ingram Settlers began arriving in this vicinity prior to the Civil War. In 1879 the Reverend J. C. W. Ingram, a Church of Christ minister from California, bought the land at this site from pioneer settler Abner McWhorter Morriss. Ingram soon opened a general store and post office. A community grew around the store and thrived for fifty years as a commercial center. During the 1930s a new highway was constructed nearby, and the original townsite gradually was abandoned as businesses began to relocate. Today Old Ingram is an arts center with studios, galleries, craft and gift shops. (1983)

Where it stands

Worth the stop nearby

• Schreiner Mansion — 6.5 mi
  The 1879 downtown home of Charles Schreiner, the Alsatian-born merchant, banker and rancher whose store and mohair trade built Kerrville.
• Treue der Union Monument — 21 mi
  An 1866 German-language monument in Comfort over the graves of Hill Country Unionists killed at the Nueces in 1862, its flag of thirty-six stars kept at half-staff.
• Old Tunnel State Park — 25 mi
  A railroad tunnel abandoned in 1942 that now shelters up to three million Mexican free-tailed bats, who fly out each evening from May through October.
• Frontier Times Museum — 26 mi
  A museum built of fossils, petrified wood and cave formations in Bandera, holding a printer-historian's collection of frontier relics and oddities.

More markers nearby

• Mary Ann Kent Byas Chambers Morriss — 1.6 mi
• Nichols Cemetery — 1.7 mi
• Henderson Cemetery (Two miles north) — 2.1 mi
• Gatlin Site — 3.7 mi